While the liberal left touts the greatness of the state recall process, another governmental right was almost squashed by them: the open records request. You might be asking yourself why such proponents of people’s rights are so against making information free. The answer I’ve found is that most liberals only like government rules that give them an advantage and don’t like it when regular citizens use it themselves. Case in point is the publication of the recall signatures, the online publication of which they’re fighting tooth and nail.
The thing that the liberals (conveniently) forget is the public record: documents made available to the public with an open records request. Whenever you’re bored, you can go online or in person to the governmental building and submit such a request. Open record requests are also fun for the national government, too, where you can see how many liberal senators voted for a particularly costly “stimulus” bill, or where President Barack Obama spent his most recent luxury vacation.
I alluded to open record requests in an earlier piece in which it was found out that more than 1,000 dead people voted for Obama in the 2008 election (voting record is public record too). This is the stuff of democracy, keeping the government transparent when it doesn’t want you to know about luxury vacations and votes cast by zombies. Thankfully, the Government Accountability Board has posted the pages, some 150,000 of public records. All was well for the liberal left, until someone with at least an introduction to computer savvy noticed something: There is no search option.
All 150,000 pages are just the copies of the recall papers. There seems to be absolutely no use in viewing the papers without a search option. Try scanning all 150,000 pages for people you know (or the fictional names people put on there). It’s almost impossible with so many pages. We are thankfully saved by an independent volunteer group that is uploading each name individually so as to give the documents a search option.
A local man recently revealed that he searched his name in the documents and (thankfully) did not find it, because he did not sign them. But he did find someone using his address to sign it. Out of so many signatures that were collected, a huge number are probably fake, just like what happened to this man. Between the man who claimed to have signed the petition 80 times, people stealing addresses to sign and copies being faxed to out-of-state people, it looks like this recall was bloated with illegal signatures. The search option is helping citizens find out if they were used for political purposes in this way. I’m expecting the number of valid signatures to quickly drop.
Of the recall signature collectors I’ve talked to, none knew the names and addresses would become public record. This certainly means they never told the people who were signing it that their names would become part of the public record for all to see. It’s not certain how many people would have been turned away at this prospect, but what they don’t know won’t hurt them, right? The left’s manifesto must be “at any cost.” Lies, deceit, fighting transparent government measures. All in a day’s work.
I almost want to see Kathleen Falk or another one of the left’s puppets win, realize that being governor isn’t as easy as it looks, screw up the economy and then be given a Nobel Peace Prize. It’d be fitting. As a moderate, I’d like someone from the left to realize this hypocrisy and change it. I encourage you to look at the recall papers and submit a formal complaint if your name and address were used against illegally.
Vincent Borkowski ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in neurobiology.
